Newt Gingrich is Working on a Book About Climate Change

Newt Gingrich is a hard man to read. He's running for president, but until his fellow non-Romney aspirants' campaigns imploded one by one and he was the last (semi) electable man standing, nobody took his candidacy seriously. Least of all himself--his entire campaign team quit early on, and he was was found vacationing in Hawaii while his competitors were crisscrossing the nation. And he doesn't seem to have any particularly firm policy ideals, though he does think it'd be a good idea to put inner city children to work doing janitorial detail at their schools and to mine minerals from the moon.

Until relatively recently, in other words, conventional wisdom has had it that his 'presidential campaign' was more of a glamorized speaking tour designed to raise his public profile so he could rake in higher speaking fees and preemptively promote his books. Which is why it's all the more humorous that the next particular book slated to be published under the Newt name is reportedly about climate change.

At a time when the Republican presidential candidates are swiftly backing away from past moderate environmental positions, Newt Gingrich may be the only one with a book pending on the topic. Gingrich and Terry L. Maple have something of a sequel in the works to their 2007 book, "A Contract with The Earth," tentatively titled "Environmental Entrepreneurs."

The duo’s first book called on policymakers and businesspeople on the right to show they had better ideas for protecting the environment and creating jobs than government did. The new book is a collection of essays by various businesspeople and scientists to be edited and stitched together by Gingrich and, mostly, Maple, a former chief executive of the Palm Beach Zoo.

And yes, the book will primarily be about fighting climate change, with at least one chapter written by a real-life, consensus-acknowledging climate scientist.

Gingrich, who has recently taken to joining the chorus of "the science isn't settled" nonsense-spouters, would evidently do well to remember the book that he's working on right now. And maybe this, too: